Category Archives: projects

I’ve sporadically gotten inspired to poke at Magical Burst, but I haven’t made a lot of progress until very recently. I posted about it a while back, but Magical Burst has two combat systems. “Skirmishes” are based on the combat rules from Magical Fury, a lightning-fast system that distills battles down to a handful of rolls and determining the consequences, while “full battles” are meant to be a tactical combat system that still generates consequences, but is also fun to play for its own sake. Shinobigami and some of Adventure Planning Service’s other recent games has a thing where there’s a “Climax Phase” to a game session where an all-out battle can happen, but otherwise clashes between characters end as soon as one character takes damage. It’s a little arbitrary perhaps, but particularly in the context of Shinobigami, it helps reinforce the genre. In the Persona games, although they use the same combat system, there’s a sharp distinction between fights with dungeon mobs and bosses. When fighting random shadows, your goal is to use their weaknesses to short-circuit things and end the battle as quickly as possible, whereas bosses are always more of an endurance test as you try to balance damage and healing. I really like having the flexibility to decide how much time you want to spend on combat in Magical Burst, because as much as I enjoy good tactical combat, I also sometimes want to just get on with the story.

Of course, that means that I’ve set myself the task of designing a tactical combat system, for the first time. Most of the RPGs I’ve designed have either minimized fighting or handled it with a more narrative approach, and while I have some really useful inspiration in D&D 4th Edition and Strike!, I needed more. I ended up looking to video games for inspiration. I went and bought a Nintendo Switch with Octopath Traveler and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle.

Octopath Traveler is a recent game from Square Enix, a a 16-bit throwback reminiscent of Final Fantasy VI with modern touches, including a gorgeous “2D HD” look with sprite characters moving through a beautiful 3D world with sprite textures and extensive lighting effects.

OT has a turn-based combat system typical of old-school JRPGs, but each round, each of your characters gets a Boost Point (unless they spent BP the previous turn). You can spend these to increase the potency of the character’s actions, turning basic attacks into multi-attacks, making magic attacks more potent, making buffs last longer, and so on. Characters can store up to 6 BP and can spend up to 3 on an action, and there are a few special skills that can manipulate BP as well. (Enemies also have various vulnerabilities, and hitting them enough times with attacks they’re vulnerable to temporarily incapacitates them. This becomes a vital strategy in the game, and makes boosted basic attacks really useful beyond doing more damage.)

It’s a little bit different, but I hit on the idea of adding a currency called “Resonance” to full battles in Magical Burst. Magical girls start with 1 Resonance, and get one at the end of each round, plus (inspired by the Miss Tokens from Strike!) one when they miss with an attack. The different specializations also get bonus Resonance based on actions that relate to their roles in combat.

I wanted to have an action economy similar to D&D4e and Strike!, but a little simpler, so I had it so that each character gets a Main Action and Support Action. Having movement be a Support Action tended to put a squeeze on the action economy though, and letting players spend a Resonance for an extra Support Action (or 3 Resonance for an extra Main Action) will hopefully alleviate that.

With characters taking Overcharge points for both rolling too high with magical checks and for using certain Talents, there’s a significant risk of full battles generating too much Overcharge relative to other parts of the game. Letting players spend Resonance to power Talents and to negate Overcharge will allow them to manage both better when they want and take bigger risks when they feel it’s worth it.

I really hope this works out in playtesting, because it feels like a really fun mechanic that will hopefully shore up the full battle system in multiple ways.

Mario + Rabbids is turning out to be more or less exactly what I’d heard it was, which is to say XCOM Lite with Mario and Rabbids characters, which somehow results in a way better game than you’d think. Some of its core mechanics are deliberately cartoony–like how if you move one of your units into the position of one of your other units, they get catapulted to another location of your choice, letting them do a double move that ignores terrain obstacles–but it also does a good job of implementing tactics fundamentals like cover. It’s a bit weird that once you get past the prologue Mario promptly gets a gun (albeit a cartoony blaster thing) and winds up with mutant Peach and Luigi Rabbids as companions, but the game shows real skill in how it gradually introduces you to its mechanics, slowly increasing your palette of tactical considerations and options.

I’m still in the process of playing Mario + Rabbids and figuring out what to take from it, but I think the biggest take-away so far is how it makes such extensive use of terrain to create new tactical considerations. One of D&D4e’s shortcomings was that while terrain was (rightly) very important, the game needed better tools to create and use interesting terrain. As much fun as we had playing it, there were a few too many battles in mostly-empty rooms, regardless of whether or not the DM was using stuff out of modules.

Looking to video games for inspiration when designing tabletop RPGs is weird, because while video games are limited in how they can use human interaction, their mechanical aspects are much more varied, with sophistication in different places. I most likely wouldn’t have come up with something like Resonance if I’d only been looking at other RPGs for example. While in RPG design you do have to use and accommodate the conversation and the fiction, the medium has a long tradition of perhaps excessively falling back on (a certain vision of) realism.

I’ve also been working more on the youma rules, and one thing that’s been really helpful is Blog of Holding’s Monster Manual 3 on a Business Card. (There’s a 5th Edition version too by the way.) As good as D&D 4th Edition was in terms of tightly designed tactical combat, it took them until Monster Manual 3 to really nail down the math for monster stats. That’s especially true of solo monsters, which had too many hit points initially, making them a slog to fight. BoH distilled that improved math down until it could fit on one side of a business card, which lays bare the sheer simplicity of determining HP, damage, defense values, etc. once the designers figured out how to balance everything right. This is proving immensely helpful to me, especially since Magical Burst, following its source material, naturally tends towards solo monsters, which are significantly harder to design. While I think the ideas I’ve been working on (like having a “Spread” value that determines how good a youma is at fighting multiple enemies) are on the right track, I needed to see there in black and white that a solo monster outright has 4x the HP.

Growing up, cartoons were a pretty massive component of my mental landscape. I was a socially awkward loner (today I’m significantly less awkward, but possibly even more introverted), and I largely filled my time by being a media junkie. TV was the major source of content available to me, and as my family graduated from rabbit ears to cable, I watched so, so many cartoons. There was then-current stuff like the Disney Afternoon, Muppet Babies, and the first generation of Nicktoons, but also old Looney Tunes shorts and episodes of shows like Tom and Jerry, Pink Panther, and Rocky and Bullwinkle that stations put on more or less as filler. In high school I got into anime in a big way, and while that filled a whole lot of my viewing time, I never completely stopped watching cartoons. Today we have brilliant stuff like Steven Universe, Regular Show, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and Gravity Falls, though if I get too much into talking about those I’ll stray from the original point of this post. The major thing I’m winding my way towards discussing is that I’m working on a mini-RPG inspired by old-school cartoons called “I Hate You: A Cartoon Story Game For Two Good Friends.”

Cartoon Precedent

The first RPG I played was Palladium’s Robotech game, but the first one I ever owned was Toon: The Cartoon Roleplaying Game, designed by Greg Costikyan (of Paranoia fame) and published by Steve Jackson Games. I got it by doing a special order from the local B. Dalton Bookseller, which was a store that still existed at the time. (That particular one became a Waldenbooks, then a Borders Express, then finally closed.) Toon is a great game that provided me and my friends with a lot of fun times, but some parts of it hold up better than others. It does a great job of explaining how to play–the “Toon Commandments” are a lot like PbtA Principles–and brilliantly codifies and explains a bunch of cartoon conventions. Kyle Miller did a ton of great art for the books that managed to capture the general feel of old school cartoons without directly aping the styles of existing ones.

For whatever reason my “weird little games” have gotten bigger and started taking longer to finish, moving from 10 pages to more like 60+ pages. On the plus side, I’ve been pretty happy with how they’ve been turning out. One of the big ones at the moment is The Dungeon Zone.

Planning to replace the art in the middle with something else, but still, I had fun making a pastiche of the OD&D box cover. I’m inordinately amused about “1-Volume Set.”

I have a weird relationship with D&D. Of course, the RPG scene in general has a weird relationship with D&D, but in particular I started playing RPGs with Palladium’s Robotech RPG, then didn’t really play any D&D until 3rd Edition came out (though I owned and read a lot of AD&D books and made a handful of faltering attempts at playing them), and then across 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions I played it for about a decade of regular play in all, before basically deciding that I’d played A Sufficient Amount of D&D. I have a lot of criticism of the game (I’m even working on a book that’s an extended critique of D&D, though it’d be a lot of work to actually bring it to fruition), though also a good amount of praise to go along with it. It can be a rollicking good time, but it’s a pretty specific game that excels at certain kinds of play and is mediocre to actively harmful for others. You can use it for stuff other than its core dungeon fantasy competence, in much the same way that if you’re determined enough you can put in nails with a screwdriver. The best D&D fiction and actual play celebrates how it’s a kitchen sink dungeon fantasy game about a band of weirdos flailing around and getting into trouble, and doesn’t try to ape Tolkien or other authors far removed from the dungeon fantasy genre.

One that particularly inspired me was The Adventure Zone‘s “Balance” campaign. The McElroy Brothers are best known for their My Brother, My Brother and Me podcast, but they do a kind of ridiculous number of other podcasts and other online stuff. TAZ is the result of them (and their dad) sitting down to play RPGs, and the Balance campaign (loosely) uses D&D 5th Edition (with a custom PbtA hack for one arc), and to me it’s pretty much everything that D&D play should aspire to. There’s also the fact that they apparently record for several hours and edit it down to a reasonable podcast length, cutting out the inevitable boring bits. Continue reading The Dungeon Zone→

The other day I finally finished Persona 5 (play time: 99 hours 38 minutes), and since I was still jonesing for some JRPG nonsense I decided to play through Galaxy Fraulein Yuna 3 for the first time in years. That in turn inspired me to start seriously working on Angel Project, the Yuna-inspired RPG I’ve been wanting to do, while some other projects are waiting on other people.

I can’t even tell you just how 90s anime the contents of this CD-ROM are.

Galaxy Fraulein Yuna is a franchise that spans three games and two OAV series, running from about 1992 to 1998. Designer Mika Akitaka did a series of “MS Girls” illustrations, making cute girl versions of different Gundam robots, and Red Company and Hudson asked him to create a game for the then fairly PC-Engine Super CD-ROM^2. (NEC branded the PC-Engine as the Turbografx-16 in the US.) Akitaka’s concepts evolved into a visual novel with a series of simple one-on-one battles scattered throughout. In the story, Yuna Kagurazaka wins a beauty contest, and then finds out that she is now the Savior of Light, tasked with protecting the galaxy. Over the course of the two PC-Engine games, two OVA series, and the final Saturn/PS1 game,[1] she fights a bunch of enemies who are mostly cute girls, and winds up befriending the majority of them. The English-speakers who know the franchise mainly know it through the anime, and unfortunately the five anime episodes only represent parts three and four out of a five-part story. It has its own distinct aesthetic and sensibility, but it’s a lot like a sillier version of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha or Symphogear, blending epic battles with lessons in friendship.

Punching in the name of friendship!

I came up with the idea for Angel Project when I was considering doing some alternate settings for Magical Burst (the other two being a Persona-ish thing called “Zero Hour” and a thing with teenagers with special powers in the vein of A Certain Scientific Railgun called “Helix Academy”). Later I ended up designing and publishing Magical Fury (which has been surprisingly popular), and a reworking of the Magical Fury rules felt like the right way to realize Angel Project. Although it has a lot of sci-fi trappings, Galaxy Fraulein Yuna is essentially a magical girl story (Yuna even has a mascot/mentor that grants her powers and advises her, but it’s a little robot thing named Elner), and although Magical Fury is a darker take on it, it’s very much a magical girl RPG. There are a lot of things I’m reworking for Angel Project, a lot of things that need to strike a different tone, but there weren’t too many rules that I had to entirely cut out. The single biggest change was that I replaced Magic/Trauma/Hope with Friendship/Silly/Despair, which should do a lot to change the overall feel and flow.

One kind of unusual and oddly fun thing in the Yuna games is that you travel to various implausibly themed planets, like the Wind Planet and the Beach Planet, so Angel Project has both rules for traveling places and a setting section that outlines places like the Machine Planet, the Fancy Planet, and the Fandom Planet. It also has more clearly defined enemies, in the form of Dark Angels, robots, Shadows (kinda like the Noise from Symphogear), Machine Generals, and so on. It’s generally going to be a bit more fleshed out than Magical Fury, and I’m enjoying doing more with that framework.

While I’m not opposed to doing darker stuff in RPGs, I definitely feel there’s a greater need for more uplifting, positive games. I want Angel Project to be a game that celebrates friendship and redemption, a game where befriending foes is not only a possible outcome, but a common one.

[1]There are a few other Yuna titles, but they’re various remakes, ports, and retellings of the stories of those five entries in the franchise.

The last push took a lot of energy, and I’m still kind of marveling at having written a 168-page book that’s so dense with references and setting info. I haven’t done all that much with setting in my games (though Dragon World is going to have the setting of Easteros in it), but this book is bursting with details about the school, and has 72 NPCs. My only regret is that I didn’t put more Utena-inspired stuff in.

Kickstarters

I have not one but two Kickstarters in the works.

Golden Sky Stories: Twilight Tales is the title we finally settled on for Mononoke Koyake, the first Japanese GSS supplement. We’re going to be properly publishing it in English and getting a print run of physical books, plus doing some nifty stretch goal stuff, albeit not nearly as much as last time (three books’ worth and then some was a bit much, not to mention the battle to get all the physical stuff printed and shipped). I was originally planning to do the Dragon World KS first, but Twilight Tales is closer to being ready, but really we’ll see how it all shakes out.

Dragon World is also going to be Kickstarting. I need to nail down some final planning stuff, and I’m waiting on the finished cover art (which is going to be elaborate, pretty, and very anime) before I launch. We also have quite a few stretch goals lined up, including some pretty cool stuff I’m looking forward to.

For both we’re going to be including wall scrolls from CustomWallScrolls.com among the rewards. We did that for GSS, and we were generally really happy with the quality and service.

DriveThruRPG Stuff

DTRPG has a thing where you get awarded a certain amount of Publisher Promotion Points, and I noticed that both the Yaruki Zero and Star Line accounts had accumulated kind of a lot, so I decided to make an effort to try using them. In addition to getting featured product impressions, I’ve tried having Golden Sky Stories, Kagegami High, and Maid RPG as Deals of the Day. The amount of sales that resulted wasn’t world-shattering, but it was substantially more than those games got without that extra promotion behind them, especially for Kagegami High (which hasn’t already gotten into the hands of quite so much of its potential audience).

Combined with the GM’s Day Sale, this is already one of the best months for RPG sales I’ve had in a while, so I’m thinking more about how to promote my stuff and reach more people, even though it’s potentially kind of a lot of work.

Other Randomness

I got inspired to check out the Savage Worlds version of Rifts. While I’m not really a fan of Savage Worlds, I was nonetheless really impressed and ended up buying all three books. (Though if I play an actual game with them I’ll probably use FAE or Strike! or something.) They managed to create a take on the world of Rifts that’s oriented towards having exciting adventures in that setting, where Palladium’s own books too often felt like an assortment of random stuff, which was cool but didn’t really cohere into a basis for stories. Each archetype is super-enthusiastic, and sells you on it being awesome to play, and in many cases makes changes that make it way more interesting.

A while back I designed Duel Questers, a mini-RPG thing for Millennium Blades, and it’s now available in the MB artbook. MB has a wonderfully bonkers setting, and it was a lot of fun to play around with it.

Nekomimi Land, a messed-up dystopian novel I’ve been working on for way too long, is nearly ready for publication, once my editor finishes with it. It’s raw and weird and imperfect, but I want to finally get it out into the world. It’ll also be my first self-published work of fiction, and I want to do more, albeit something a bit lighter next time.

It still needs a little more work, but I finished the first draft of Kagegami High and did some playtesting. Along the way I’ve wound up thinking a lot about the thematic and artistic underpinnings of it. I didn’t set out to create Kagegami High with a specific set of themes in mind, but I think I’ve figured out what themes I want it to have over the course of writing it.

The world at large is weird about Japanese schoolgirls. Japanese schoolgirls are, you know, human beings (of a particular age, gender, and nationality) with their own individual thoughts and agency, and they have perhaps unusually fertile and creative subcultures. (Though there are others that are less celebrated, like the wonderfully gonzo fashion subcultures of Africa.) Japanese schoolgirls are a pretty major market demographic in Japan too, and a lot of companies are trying to reach them as trendsetters and consumers. On the other hand they’re the subject of a mystique and a worrisome bundle of fetishes, and they get used as a motif as well. There’s a lot of anime and related media that deals with schoolgirls in various ways, and while there are women who create anime and manga about schoolgirls and draw on their own experiences (Naoko Takeuchi and Aoki Ume come to mind), a lot of it is by and for men. Fine art that touches on Japanese schoolgirl subject matter is often like surrealism’s treatment of women in that it’s often more about the idea of women from a male perspective.

Although I’m necessarily coming at this from the perspective of a white guy, I think an important (if somewhat subtle) part of Kagegami High is looking at the dissonance between Japanese high school girls as human beings and Japanese high school girls as an artistic concept and motif. The cartoonish surveillance state of the school isn’t just a reflection of the intrusive surveillance of society, but a metaphor for the eyes directed at Japanese schoolgirls, in both reality and fantasies. Or as one entry in the school announcements table puts it:

You are being watched, curiously, intently, lazily, lustily. You can feel the eyes on you, the alien eyes from another reality, the eyes that belong to those for whom your existence is an ideal beyond reach, but never out of mind. There’s something disgusting about them, something disturbing.

I think a lot of the game’s content is about living in a world with massive forces that make the individual feel small. That’s something we all experience, but as a group that’s fetishized and commodified and so on, Japanese schoolgirls seem like an ideal lens to explore those themes. Conspiracy theorists deal with that feeling by adopting the belief that they’re unusually capable people who’ve managed to see through to the truths that evade the great mass of sheeple. Kagegami High students deal with these things in a variety of different ways, but especially by way of joining clubs like the Illuminati Club, Conspiracy Club, Genetically Modified Organisms Club, or the Kagegami High Troubleshooting Protagonists Club. There’s also the part about how the game makes players engage this fictional world through a female character, albeit a pretty weird one more often than not.

David Dees is a fascinating artist, albeit a worrisome one.

Kagegami High is also decidedly surreal. A lot of that is a result of simply going where the inspiration of Maid RPG, Sayounara Zetsubou-sensei, and Welcome to Night Vale took me, but I have been consciously exploring surreal art, both in terms of the specific art movement of the 1920s and in general. Surrealism makes statements about the human experience through absurd, impossible, yet realistically-rendered imagery that carries a certain dreamlike quality. As in the game’s source material, Kagegami High’s ridiculous microcosm of society reflects reality through a funhouse mirror to highlight just how strange the world we live in really is. Some of the content of Kagegami High is inevitably going to be random for the sake of randomness (and thus maybe a bit Dadaist), but a lot of it makes statements about the world in various ways. Students have to navigate all kinds of nonsensical rules, are expected to treat the rich girls among them as though they were inherently better even if they’re in the middle of proving otherwise, and have civics classes where they learn all about bribery and intimidation.

I also tried to give it a core of kindness and compassion. The students of Kagegami High are in a strange, paranoid world, but they form friendships and find a kind of belonging. Much like in Night Vale, there are those parts when that one melancholy Disparition song plays, and everyone reflects on what they’ve made it through together. Along with the power-hungry maniacs, your Kagegami High classmates include the cloyingly sincere, good-natured friends who, despite being weirdos themselves, try to help you all make it through things together.

Anyway. Kagegami High clocks in at 168 pages, 63,000 words, and over 200 graphical elements, and it’s going to be my most ambitious original game thing so far. I’m not even sure what it is that I’ve made, but I hope you all enjoy it.

Since it’s about the only thing I’ve made any real progress on lately, I might as well post a bit more about Kagegami High.

Early on I laid out a bunch of tables and other stuff to built out the setting and the game, and the lion’s share of the additional writing I need to do is simply completing the tasks I’ve set for myself, like writing up the 36 classmates and 18 faculty members, and filling out a bunch of random event tables for different general situations.

Aesthetics

I’ve ended up spending a lot of time adding visual elements to Kagegami High, and far more of them than for pretty much anything I’ve done before. Despite that, at least for now I haven’t commissioned any original artwork and probably won’t unless I decide I want to crowdfund an updated/deluxe version of the game. The game’s source material includes a lot of titles that tend to express things in ways other than illustrations, and what visuals there are for Welcome to Night Vale tend to be the sort that allude and imply things rather than showing them outright. The purple Night Vale logo with a crescent moon inside of an eye really sets the mood for the audio content, and in a way it makes sense to do something like that for a certain kind of role-playing game.

I’ve been using the Noun Project a lot in my various games and such (to the point where the $9.99 a month for a pro subscription has been well worth it for me), and the black and while symbols for things have been incredibly useful for Kagegami High, both as-is and as raw materials for creating the things I actually want. While it was a simple matter to get an icon of a soccer ball to be the symbol of the school’s soccer club, for the “Popular Girls Club” I used two existing icons to build the one I wanted:

The other thing I’ve been able to do is make weird schoolgirl silhouettes to scatter throughout the book. It took me a little while to figure out the right process for this, and now I may have gone a little overboard.

I start with stock art, usually from DLSite or one of the many sites offering stock art for RPG Maker. In both cases the key search term to know is 絵素材 (esozai) literally “picture materials,” but basically “stock art.” Not all of these are at print resolution, but that’s one of the benefits of making them into silhouettes and vectorizing them.

In Photoshop, press Ctrl-U to get the Hue/Saturation adjustment dialog, and drag the Lightness slider all the way to the left to make the entire thing black. (Though you may need to use a paintbrush to fill in any white spots left over.)

Open the image in Illustrator (or paste it in).

Click on Image Trace to create a vector version. Maybe tweak the settings a little to get it how you want. Click Expand, then use the Ungroup command to separate the new vector object from the original raster image. Get rid of any extraneous stuff left over from the conversion.

Once I have the vectorized silhouette, it’s pretty easy to take some Noun Project elements and turn it into something especially weird. The Noun Project’s app for macOS lets you drag and drop, making that step super easy, but it’s not too big a deal to download the SVG file instead. Regardless, the Live Paint tool is invaluable here since it lets you easily fill in parts of objects, much like the paint bucket tool in Photoshop. In the example below, I started with this eye icon, and filled the pupil with black and the white with, you know, white, so that it didn’t totally disappear when placed on top of the silhouette. Thus we have a gangly schoolgirl with one vividly visible eye, and in a form that can print smoothly at any scale.

Since I’m still doing layouts in Word for some reason, I save it as an EPS file, which I can then embed into the Word doc.

So yeah. Between icons and silhouettes and a few other things, the book will probably have a few hundred visual elements (in addition to some shenanigans with fonts and Unicode characters and such). It’s something that fits this particular game really well and wouldn’t work most of the time, but I’ve been very pleased with the results, and not just because it’s inexpensive.

Rules Stuff

The rules are another thing that I’ve given more attention that I expected to. Early on in the process I started by literally copying and pasting the rules section from Schoolgirl RPG as a starting point, which is to say I began with the lightest possible implementation of the Maid RPG rules, and from there I got inspired to make some important changes.

The biggest thing was that the Ghostbusters RPG and Spooktacular made such an impression on me that I decided to graft a variant of that dice system onto M.A.I.D. Engine chassis. Rolling a bunch of dice has smoother probabilities and is just more viscerally fun than rolling a single die, and the Ghost Die (which becomes the “Weird Die” in Kagegami High) generally adds a lot of fun. While the notion of something hilariously screwing you over doesn’t fit as well, having a die trigger something weird (which can just be a random event if all else fails) works nicely. (It also gives me an excuse to get custom Weird Dice made!) This also consequently meant that the scale for stats needed to be a little wider (1-6 instead of 0-4), and generally led to some tweaks elsewhere in the game.

I also added Principles and GM Moves, descended from the principles and MC moves of Apocalypse World. These are essentially a distillation of the techniques I’ve worked out for playing/running Maid RPG, adjusted for how I envision Kagegami High working. The GM moves are a little different from AW’s MC moves in that some of them fall into the realm of actual mechanics, presenting stuff like calling for random events and assigning Awesome Points into that clear format.

The most recent–and most experimental–addition is the concept of “invoking a trait,” which lets players spend Awesome Points to leverage a Special Quality or other trait into making something happen in the fiction. It’s tricky because unlike Fate (where the idea came from, of course) Maid RPG wasn’t designed from the ground up with that sort of thing in mind, but I definitely do like the idea of having a procedure for making Special Qualities and such come into the game in an interesting way.

There’s still plenty left to do, but I’m definitely looking forward to playtesting and eventually publishing this one.